Author Information: Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs is a forensic anthropologist for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, State of North Carolina, and for the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Quebec. She is one of only fifty forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology and is on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. A professor of anthropology at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dr. Reichs is a native of Chicago, where she received her Ph.D. at Northwestern. She now divides her time between Charlotte and Montreal and is a frequent expert witness in criminal trials.

Her work as a forensic anthropologist is internationally recognized. She has traveled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide, helped identify individuals from mass graves in Guatemala, and done forensic work at Ground Zero in New York. For her work with CILHI she has identified war dead from World War II; from all of Southeast Asia – she even examined the remains from the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Experiences she has had while working in forensic anthropology spawned her best selling novels. Each new story plays on an aspect of forensic anthropology and matter classification that Dr. Reichs has personally used in her work, allowing her main character, Temperance Brennan’s work to be authentic.